White Papers for Gramm Leach Bliley Act (GLBA)
The Convergence of Viruses and Spam
MessageLabs First lets consider some hard facts relating to the recent SoBig.F outbreak, the fastest-growing email virus ever:
MessageLabs stopped more than a million emails carrying the Sobig.F virus during the first 24 hours of the outbreak.
And in excess of 6.4 million further copies during the first week. Typically we stop between one and two million viruses a month. To see this many copies of one particular virus is absolutely unprecedented.
MessageLabs scans, on average, between 16 and 18 million emails for customers each day. During the first 24 hours the volume rose by more than 60% to over 25 million emails. At peak we were stopping 12 SoBig.F viruses every second!
The ratio of virus to emails topped 1:17. After a week this had slowed to 1:48 still huge by any standards.
It took conventional anti-virus software vendors a full 13 hours to come up with a signature, or fix, for SoBig.F after it first appeared. This meant non-MessageLabs customers were wide open to the virus for at least 13 hours. Its not hard to see how the most intrusive virus in history was able to gain such a devastating grip.
The facts in terms of SoBig.Fs extraordinary proliferation tell only a part of an alarming story, however. What is less well known and what concerns those unprotected from this menace most is the knock-on implications for those who have been infected. This white paper explains the emerging history of the SoBig virus in its various incarnations. It explains how the virus is designed to work and why its payload is potentially so much more sinister than most previous viruses.
View the White Paper
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